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Bees weighted with pollen were working in fireweed on the slope below the
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spring. Katsuk thought:
They watch us. They are the spirit eyes from which we never escape.
He stared through leaf-tattered light at the working creatures. They were
fitted into the orderliness of this place. They were not many creatures, but
one single organism. They were Bee, the spirit messenger who had brought him
here.
The boy finished drinking at the spring, sat back on his heels, watchful,
waiting.
For a glimmering instant, something in the set of the boy's head opened for
Katsuk a glimpse of the man who had fathered this human. The adult peered out
of youthful eyes, weighing, judging, planning.
Momentarily, it unnerved Katsuk to think of that man-and-father here. The
father was no innocent.
He would have all of the hoquat vices.
He would have the powers, evil and good, which had given the hoquat dominion
over the primitive world. That one must be kept in the background,
suppressed.
How could it be done? The boy's flesh could not be separated from that which
gave it life. A spirit power must be invoked here. Which spirit power? How?
Could the man-father be driven away with his own guilt?
Katsuk thought:
My father should come to help me now.
He tried to call up a vision of his father, but no face came, not even a
voice.
Katsuk felt the seeds of panic.
There had been a father. The man had existed. He was back there walking the
beaches, fishing, breeding two children. But he had taken the path of drink
and inward rage and a death in the water. Were the hoquat to blame for that?
Where was his face, his voice? He was Hobuhet, the Riverman, whose people had
lived on this land for twice a thousand years. He had fathered a son.
And Katsuk thought:
But I am no longer Charles Hobuhet. I am Katsuk. Bee is my father.
I have been called to do a terrible thing. The spirit I must call upon is
Soul Catcher.
Silently, he prayed then, and saw at once how the boy's eyelids blinked, how
his attention wandered. No power stood against Soul Catcher in this
wilderness. Once more, Katsuk felt calm. The greatest of the spirits could
not be doubted. The hoquat father had been driven back into the flesh. Only
the Innocent remained.
Katsuk arose and strode off along the slope, hearing the boy follow. There
had been no need for words of command. Soul Catcher had created a wake in the
air which drew the boy into it as though he were caught on a tow line.
Now, Katsuk left the game trail he had been following and struck off through
moss-draped
hemlocks. There was a granite ledge up above them somewhere hemming in the
river valley.
Without ordering his feet to seek that place, Katsuk knew he could find it.
He came on the first outcroppings within the hour and moved out of the trees,
climbing a slope of stunted huckleberry bushes toward rock shade. The boy
followed, panting, pulling himself up by the bushes as he saw Katsuk doing.
They emerged presently on a bald rock and there was the river valley spread
out southward with sweet grass and elk grazing in a meadow.
A string of fat quail stuttered through sun-splashed shadows below him,
catching Katsuk's attention. The quail reminded him of a hunger which he knew
his body would feel if it were time for that sensation. But he sensed no
hunger, knowing by this that his flesh had accommodated itself to primitive
ways.
The boy had sprawled out on sun-warmed rock. Katsuk wondered if Hoquat felt
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hunger or denied it. The lad also was accommodating to primitive ways. But
how was he doing it?
Was he immersed so deeply in each moment that only the needs of the moment
called out to his senses? The climb had tired him and thus he rested. That
was the correct way. But what else had changed in the hoquat flesh?
Carefully, Katsuk studied his captive. Perspiration had left damp darkness in
the hair at the boy's neck. Stains of brown dirt marked the legs of his
trousers. Streaks of mud were drying on his canvas shoes.
Katsuk smelled the boy's sweat, a youthful, musky sweetness in it which called
up memories of school locker rooms. He thought:
It is a fact that the earth which marks us on the surface also leaves its
traces within us.
There would come a moment when the boy was tied so firmly to this wilderness
that he could not escape it. If the link were forged in the right way,
innocence maintained, there would be a power in it to challenge any spirit.
I was marked by his world; now he is marked by mine.
This had become a contest on two levels -- the straightforward capture of a
victim and the victim's desire to escape, but beneath that a wrestling of
spirits. The signs of that other contest were all around.
Katsuk looked out across the valley. There was an old forest on the far
slope, fire dead, burned silver hacking the green background into brittle
shapes.
The boy turned onto his back, threw a hand across his eyes.
Katsuk said: "We will go now."
"Can't we wait just a minute?" Without removing the hand from his eyes.
Katsuk chuckled. "You think I don't know what you've been doing?"
The boy took the hand away, looked up at Katsuk. "What do you. . . ."
"You slow down when we're crossing a meadow. You trip when we ford the river,
then you want me to build a fire. You think I don't know why you complained
when we left the elk trail?"
Blood suffused the boy's cheeks.
Katsuk said: "Look where we are now, eh?" He pointed skyward. "Wide open to
searching devil machines, huh? Or men could see us from the valley. They
could identify us with binoculars."
The boy glared at him. "Why do you say devil machines instead of helicopters?
You know
what they are."
"True, I know what you think they are. But different people see things
differently."
David turned away. He felt stubborn determination to prolong this moment in
the open.
Hunger and fatigue helped him now. They sapped his physical strength but fed
his rage. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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